Main navigation

About this blog

As the site name suggests, this is an eclectic mix of postings intended to bring some light into the mind of the reader. Its two main topics are Macs and macOS, and paintings.

You can follow news about this blog on Twitter @howardnoakley, via RSS news feed, or of course by dropping by whenever you have a moment.

My first post here was on 17 January 2015. Since then it has just grown and grown, now with over 100,000 views each month. This blog has been visited by people from almost every country in the world, and I welcome you all.

To help you navigate this eclecticism, there are two different tools in the menus:

The main menu items take you to articles in that particular category, such as Macs or Painting;

There are specialist contents pages in which I maintain listings of articles by topic; these cover Mac problem-solving, Painting topics, Downloads, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Extended Attributes (xattrs), English language topics, and more. These include product pages for each of the free apps which are available from here.

There are also the usual tag lists, and a search facility. If you would like additional help with navigation, please let me know.

If you see anything here, words or images, which you do not think is properly attributed and credited, please let me know as soon as possible so that I can correct that.

This site is not sponsored, nor does it force you to suffer advertising or commercial overhead. I do not seek donations, but welcome your spreading ‘likes’ and appreciation. Where you think that I am wrong, or wish to discuss any points, please feel free. But always remain as polite with me (and others) as I am with you, and please do not try to subvert this blog as a platform for bigotry. We are all humans, friends and colleagues in lives which are quite stressful and challenging enough without making it any more unpleasant.

Hello
I was looking for an image of Unterberger’s painting of the Basilica of San Marco, as it was recently stolen from the house of the widow of Michael Winner. It seems that one is hard to find. I found this on your blog: “Although I have been unable to locate any of the Piazza, his Rio Santa Barnaba, Venice …” I don’t know whether this is Unterberger’s mistake or yours, but San Barnaba is a male saint.

I’m sorry you’ve gone quiet! Very grateful for the link one of your posts gave me to the painter Adrian Stokes – and the book he published in 1909 on his Hungarian trip with his painter wife..I shall incorporate this in the book I’m just completing on “Mapping Romania”, the latest version of which you can find here – https://issuu.com/ronaldyoung0/docs/new_mapping_romania_c69665ff1f9e92

Thanks for the link, and congratulations on the book.
No, I have not gone quiet, not in the slightest. Language posts have been much less frequent: this is partly in response to their relatively low readership, and partly because I have my work cut out in the other sections too.
Eclecticism has its downside too!
Howard.

Came across your site while trying to fix a software problem which fixed itself (I love Macs). Anyway you have a site which puts together technical and artistic under one wrapper; information enjoyed reading but for differing reasons, one practical information/advise and the other visual treats to while away time.

One problem noticed, your “About This Blog” has the top chopped off on my machine. Can still make out what the thread is about though.

I have had a chance to look at the issue with this article’s header. As the browser window width changes, so the page adjusts to try to fit best to the width – that is a feature of the theme which I use. Unfortunately, there are one or two critical window widths which sometimes can result in glitches in appearance, and you happen to have found one.
As this is a paid-for theme, there is nothing that I can do to adjust or fix that, I am afraid. However by making just a couple of pixels width adjustment to your browser window, it should rescale itself into something which looks much better.
I am sorry about that.
Howard.

Odd thing about this whole story is that immediately after I posted, the intro. titile displayed correctly.
Believe me I don’t hold you accountable. Years ago I worked on my own blog through B2evolution, and had the same type of problem, usually associated with text displays on different browsers. Explorer then was the culprit, requiring a whole set of fixes, hacks or whatever to get text it to display accurate. Opera and Firefox where good, Safari I never checked because I was using a Win pc.
One other thing, I never used a specific theme at B2, usually did everything from scratch. Once I master format to a degree, I lost interest in the whole affair – failing to copy my database on changing ISP (sad).

A personal font, LGUI Regular mod.TTF, caused Sierra System fonts to conflict, resulting in blank Password boxes. I could type passwords and they would be accepted if accurate, but no typing would show in the boxes. This drove me crazy until I began w only Sierra fonts and gradually added back/rebooting my font collection. For whatever reason, this one font conflicts w Sierra. Just for your information. I appreciate all your work.

Thank you for your kind words. I hope that I can keep your interest in my posts about both Macs and paintings: if there’s anything that you’d like me to cover – in either field – just let me know here or by email.
You will have gathered that I mainly write about what fascinates me, and because I enjoy getting to grips with topics and trying to understand them. There is no better way than trying to explain them to someone else.
Howard.

Nice to meet! I just discovered this rich and beautiful Blog, and will have to read a lot… One tiny note though. The main menu, although simple and helpful in content, could enjoy a little typographic facelift. Fonts, spacing and color choice make it a little hard to read.

I found your Magnasco piece fascinating. I have two paintings that were sold as Magnasco’s in Paris in the early 20thc. The paintings and the frames match the right period. Might you, or someone you know, be willing to take a look at them to see if they ring any bells?

I am afraid that I am not the right person to attempt to do this.
One dealer who has experience with Magnasco is Canesso. They may be able to suggest someone who is an expert. If you have some good-quality images of the paintings, that should help them considerably.
I wish you success, and would be fascinated to hear of the outcome.
Howard.

Thank you, Howard. I will try them. I just had one of them in with the conservators and they are working on the second. They are good, but this is Australia, so rather remote. They restored a Winterhalter of my great x 3 grandmother so I am not worried that they will fail to do a great job but we all agree that an expert should take a look.

As a long-time Mac technician (since OS 6!) I was thrilled to come across your site for the first time today! I have barely scratched the surface searching for possible solutions or new approaches to solving life’s most vexing problems, such as dealing with Word and InDesign files that reside on a server (even a Mac one) ;-). But seriously, your post on Mac “cleaning” software immediately convinced me you know what you are talking about, and I actually look forward to spending some evenings browsing your myriad of posts. I wonder why my daily Google searches for Mac troubleshooting info has never come up with your site before? I am not a web designer at all, but maybe some SEO work might help spread the word? At any rate, thank you for maintaining this very unique blog – I might even learn a lot more about painting!

Thank you for your kind words. There are a lot of commercial Mac websites which do much better out of search engine ratings, so many of my articles get lost in the noise. I don’t go round trying to promote the site – I’d rather put my time and effort into writing good content for it.
We’re growing well, though: for a long time I struggled to get a couple of hundred views a day. We’re now running to more than 10,000 each week, which is pleasing. And I hope that you enjoy the paintings and other postings here too.
Howard.

Your blog is truly a treasure trove for any painter. I’d love to see you dig into and share your thoughts on the California Impressionists (Wendt, Payne, Bischoff etc.) and maybe spend some time on Edward Seago. Please keep this going, I’m enjoying getting lost in all of this painterly goodness!

Thank you for your kind words.
One problem that I have with the work of twentieth century painters is copyright: anyone who died after 1946 is unfortunately still covered by copyright. This not only makes it impossible to show their images here, without the permission of their estate, but also severely limits those available.
Howard.

Have you ever found where the system provides access to file tags? I’m not talking about manipulating tags on specific files, I’m talking the system-wide index to file tags. When you tag a file in Finder it knows about all of the tags in use instantly. I’m curious where it’s getting that information from. I’d like to make more use of tags myself but the lack of a system-wide index is hampering my efforts.

That’s a good question, and I think I know the answer now, although you’re not going to like it.
When you add a tag to an item, the Finder adds that as metadata – an xattr of type com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags:
Although there might be a separate tag index (I doubt it, though), as an xattr that is stored in the volume metadata – see this article.
Howard.

I confirm that it’s ‘ h [dot] oakley [at] btconnect [dot] com ‘ as given above: just insert the @ and . and remove the spaces, which are there to prevent its automatic harvest. Or you can tweet me @howardnoakley
Howard.

ENJOYED YOUR DETAILED ARTICLE CONCERNING ART MOVEMENT IN PONT AVEN, BRITTANY, FRANCE. ANOTHER ARTIST THAT PAINTED THERE WAS HAMILTON HAMILTON. HE PAINTED MOSTLY IN U.S. BUT HE PAINTED IN PONT AVEN. ……..AT LEAST ONE PANTING!!! AS WE HAVE AN ORIGINAL OIL OF HIS CALLED CORNER OLD MARKET PLACE. IT IS SIGNED AND DATED. THROUGH OUR RESEARCH WE FOUND THE SAME SCENE IN PONT AAVEN PAINTED BY NATHANIEL HILL (IRELAND). WE CONTINUE TO RESEARCH THIS PAINTING/ARTIST (THE PAINTING HAS BEEN IN OUR FAMILY FOR MANY YEARS)

PLEASE LET US KNOW WHERE WE CAN RESEARCH ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THIS ARTIST/THIS PAINTING!

Thank you, Steve.
Hamilton Hamilton is not at all well known, although there is a market for his paintings. I recommend that you contact your nearest major art museum/gallery, aiming your enquiry at their specialist in 19th century art. It helps to be able to provide them with a good high-resolution digital image of the painting.
They should be able to put you in touch with a specialist who knows a lot about this artist.
I wish you success,
Howard.

A big thank you for all your help on your web site (tnx too for the topics on the art). Your utilities and the references you post about other “how to” articles are of great help.

BTW, are you the specialist of cold injuries living on the isle of Wight and did you experiment with the Newton 20 years ago (in which case we already talked together at that time) ?

I should have followed your advice of not moving from Sierra to High Sierra:

I attempted to do so on Monday, and I am still working at restoring back to macOS 10.12. I work on a MacPro5,1. When I tried to update my system it was stuck during the update procedure. I was left with a nonfunctional system, but the EFI was updated to version MP51.0085.B00. On a second attempt, the mac booted OK and the EFI was updated again to MP51.0087.B00. In spite of the claim of Dominic Giampaolo – only the meta data would change – none of my numerous apps were copied. I decided to go on for another round: same result! Also I looked for the recovery partition and none was there. However after rebooting the system with Cmd-R and a lot of internet activities, the Mac was “on Recovery”. I then launched the Migration Assistant to copy my apps. After an hour or so the Assistant told me that there was not enough space on my SSD drive: why didn’t Apple warn me beforehand (of course I understand that this evaluation is not straightforward, but I would expect more from Apple). Again I reinstalled the system on a larger drive and migrated my apps only to be told that everything was not copied, but without telling me what!! It turns out that my backup application “BRU Server” was among the stuff not copied even though the Tolis Group says that their software was compatible with 10.13. Last but not least, when I tried to access my mail with Apple Mail using SMTP and POP3, the setup was gone as was my mails stored locally too. I already had problems when moving from the V2 to V4 mail database, but moving to V5 did not work either. That was too much, I reverted to the old Mac setup, and with millions of files this required a lot of patience.

rant on>
I am an EE, so I read about some of the failures of MacBook Pro’s. Like many other electronic devices there are quite a few electrolytic capacitors in a Mac and these devices tend to “dry up” with time. According to two reports, Apple uses cheap components. I would gladly pay a lot more for quality products, but I am not sure that Apple is following up on quality issues…
<rant off

Alberic,
It’s lovely to meet you again, here. Yes, I am now retired from medical practice and concentrating more on Macs and painting at last.
I’m sorry to hear that you suffered with High Sierra. I’m optimistic that Mojave is going to be far better, and enjoying its betas at the moment. I’m just about to discover whether I can wake my MacBook Pro without having to reset its SMC (something which struck it with an earlier release).
Component quality is an ongoing issue, although Apple remains one of the best vendors in this respect. Many other PCs have had huge problems with counterfeit capacitors, something that I wrote about some years ago. A few Macs – very few – have had those issues, but Mac hardware had tended to suffer more where Apple has been trying to innovate. The quality achieved in their pre-production prototypes hasn’t always made it out into production. I think that is at the heart of the current MacBook Pro keyboard failures, for example.
The fact that so many MacPro5,1 systems are still going strong, and old white MacBooks, is evidence that Apple does sometimes make Macs which last a lot longer than they had perhaps intended!
Very best regards,
Howard.

I am retired too, but still much interested in electroacoustics and digital filtering; of course to listen to music (classical from late 19th century and so on as well as jazz from the bebop era and later). I could need lots more power to do 3D acoustics modeling…

We’ll see about Mojave, but for now I am sticking to Sierra!

True, that my eight years old Mac is still running fine. I have increased RAM, put a nice AMD 7950 graphics card and replaced the disks. My guess is that Steve Jobs loved good products more than Tim Cook. BTW this modularity is what I would expect from the forthcoming Mac Pro.

Thank you for an AMAZING website.
Didn’t know where else to post this – but I really need your guidance.
Ran into an issue with a MacBook Air 2015 which has been upgraded from El Capitan to Sierra to High Sierra. The keychain access listings have HUGE entry duplication for everything in this machine and some duplicated in the other Macbook Pro device on the same iCloud account.
For instance 100’s of entries for imessage, only on this laptop.

Worse, I noticed this user is synced by iCloud across two mobile devices and two laptops, but this particular Macbook Air 13″ is harboring 100’s of deprecated passwords and entries NOT reflected on these other iCloud linked devices. I noticed this for her hosted Microsoft Exchange using Outlook 2016 on an Exchange 2016 server. Outlook is insisting on using an OLD Keychain access password that was no longer valid. Once I deleted all older references to Exchange / Outlook passwords, and then re-entered without adding to keychain, it stuck.

What I would like is a utility like Keychain Check 2 – to dump all OLDER entries for the entire keychain database – where there are multiple entries – on this localized anomaly Macbook Air, and make sure all duplicate entries are flushed out. This is on High Sierra. Does your keych0ain utility do these things (normalize all systems with keychain access databases tied to the same iCloud account?
Also can I do anything to flip the ‘memory’ of passwords in iCloud to ‘This mac only’) so I can more easily abandon the iCloud references?

There’s no simple solution to problems as complex as these.
An important task is to establish exactly which keychains are active on each Mac (there’s not much to be done with iOS devices), and how they are shared in iCloud.
Normally with iCloud sharing, only the login keychain is shared. There are no options with that – it’s either shared or its not.
However if there are additional keychains apart from login, they will not be shared, AFAIK. That could account for these anomalies.
So long as a keychain is being shared over iCloud, it is almost impossible to edit or tidy. The moment that another device sharing that keychain pops up again, it will promptly sync back anything that you have removed.
Therefore the best way to deal with this is to turn iCloud Keychain off on all devices for the time being, then clean the keychain(s) up on that Mac, using Keychain Access. You may then find it necessary to reset/clean all other devices before you put them back onto sharing the keychain, or once again they will fill iCloud Keychain up with junk.
This is the sort of problem which keeps me from using iCloud Keychain: I only share between iOS devices and my secondary Macs, not my main desktop, which I keep on local keychains. Every once in a while, when I think it’s safe, I put my desktop Mac onto iCloud Keychain and let it sync up recent passwords, etc., then quickly take it back off before it all goes crazy.
I hope that helps,
Howard.

Big help, Thanks! (Gives me a sanity check as to what is and is not possible.)
Can you reply with a link of any feature list of what exactly Keychain Check 2 can do? I couldn’t find that…
Keep up the great work.

If you download KeychainCheck 2, you’ll find a PDF detailing everything about it. From the intro:It tells you where your default keychain is located, basic information about it including whether it is locked or not, lists all the keychains which are currently ‘active’, and those which have been opened over the last hour (not in High Sierra or Mojave, yet). It also provides more extensive information about the contents of each of your keychain folders, including that used by iCloud Keychain. It lets you unlock and lock your default keychain without having to open Keychain Access.
Howard.

I recommend that you implement your diagnostic tools on the command line first, and then write the GUI version for people who prefer it. Perhaps you do this already? If so, please distribute the command line tools for us geeks who prefer using Terminal. Thanks!

Thanks for the suggestion.
Where a tool does something which is currently inaccessible or very difficult at the command line, I usually try to provide a command version – for example, creating a Finder alias, comparing xattrs of two files, and writing to the unified log.
Many of my tools, such as LockRattler and Consolation, wrap existing command tools (or readily-written short scripts) into a GUI. So I’m not really sure which you’d want in command tool form.
There is a coming problem with command tools too: at present, it doesn’t look as if they’re going to work well with Mojave’s new privacy policies, and it’s unclear how they can be notarized in readiness for future macOS.
I also note, rather sadly, that for the effort that I go to in providing command tools, they are very seldom downloaded in comparison with their GUI versions.
Howard.

Hello Howard, I came across your blog when googling my pet subject, visual narrative. I did my PhD thesis at the Sorbonne on the possibility and modalities of visual narrative and have nearly exclusively written about the subject in the last few years. I find the quality of your texts exceptional and the more I read the more I wanted to know who you are – and if you are even alone – but I could not find the About page until I googled it. I think your texts are book quality. In any case, feel free to take a look at my own work (which is very narratology-driven and thus might or might not be of interest to you) here: http://klausspeidel.de/

Thank you, Klaus, for your generous words.
You might enjoy next weekend: I have three whole posts about ‘continuous’ narrative in paintings, taking it from Roman times to 1947.
Thanks too for the link: I will take a good look a bit later.
Howard.

Hello Howard! Sounds splendid. I wrote quite a bit about this device in my thesis. A tiny bit of the theory is in my Diegesis article: https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/view/128 Basically, I believe that it is wrongly deemed more naive to show more than one moment in a picture. It’s just trading temporal richness for visual accuracy. And a still image is always an artifice, whether you show the same person once, twice, or six times doesn’t matter. It’s just that photography has gotten us so used to the equation one picture = one moment that anything else seems odd to us. I also revised the Wickhoff/Weitzmann system for classifying the kinds of pictures… . But that still needs publishing… .

Dear Howard, I’ve been following your blog for a while now and find it overwhelming in it’s thoroughness, especially the mac section. I wondered if I could ask for your help on a problem I’ve had with macOS(/Mac OS X) for some time and never figured out how to solve.

Hi Howard, very eclectic site indeed! I am a graphic designer and Mac users, so I am not totally surprised! Anyhow, I came across your site because I’ve been scratching my head trying to unarchive a family video I created eons ago. Of course my family and I would love to restore it but I can’t find the original software anywhere on my discs or on the web. But the readme file has your name in it, and it said it was backed up using some called Impression using hfspax. Does this sound familiar? I would be very grateful if you have a utility or at least a lead as to what I can use to restore it. I have it backed up onto 8 CDs. It would have to be something that could run on High Sierra or Mojave. Anyhow, sorry for the long message, but do let me know if you have any recommendations. Thanks so much! Karl

Karl,
Oh goodness – this is going back 15 years or more. hfspax was a modified version of the pax command tool which handled extended attributes, which I worked on as free software early after the introduction of Mac OS X. Someone else (sorry, I can’t remember their name offhand) then bundled it up with a friendly front end called Impression, which he then sold commercially, with my agreement (but no royalty to me!).
You’d need to go right back to an system running something like 10.1 or 10.2 I think to be able to run Impression again. Things have changed so much since then that even trying to piece it together using the current pax command would almost certainly fail.
I don’t know what to suggest, I’m afraid. I’m not even sure if I have the old C source for hfspax any more.
Howard.

Howard,
Ok, thanks for the reply at least. So interesting to hear the background, even though it won’t solve my dilemma. Leave it to the web to allow me to find something so obscure, ha! I think my wife has one of those old white Macbooks in a box somewhere, it just might be old enough! But I haven’t found anyone that actually has the Impression software anywhere. Let me know if ever think of any leads though.
Thank you,
Karl

Howard,
this may be the wrong place to ask this but I used Cirrus to find out what is going on with my iCloud Drive why it is stuck on all devices on this specific iCloud account I’ve opened up numerous tickets with apple and they can’t figure it out and I can’t figure it out so I ran a log and was hoping you could tell me what is holding up my iCloud Drive from uploading anything on any devices linked to it. I make a new iCloud account and have no problem uploading to the same iCloud Drive by sharing it to a family.

Might be a wrong place to ask, but I have a small question about Rosettavert. Have you considered adding the alternate codepages names to the CP selection box as well? For example, currently it shows just one (arbitrarily chosen?) of the common names, like MS EE for what is also listed by iconv as CP1250 MS-EE WINDOWS-1250.
I can understand that it could possibly make sorting the list a little more difficult, but it would help a lot when looking for some obscure codepage more commonly known by the alternate names. So far, I usually had to invoke “iconv —list” anyway to have a look at the alternate names.

Hard to leave comments to the distinguished Hoakley in relation to articles due to blocked comments. I will bug you here!
Notarization: much pain over the last few months with builds (apps, installers, and DMGs) multiple times a week. But I finally am back to a single set of scripts that handle everything barring errors with some extensive trundling.
But I have not figured out how to reliably test the user experience on my Catalina systems since they retain quarantine info. So apart from stapler checks there is no way to detect other issues.
Is there a way to clear the flags so a test server download will be treated as fresh?
Appreciate your insight.
BTW, really enjoying this site!

Thanks.
If you want to test the full user experience, that’s easy to do by adding a quarantine flag to whatever the user would download. One quick and simple way to do that is with my free utility xattred – open the DMG/Zip/whatever and click on the button to add a quarantine flag. Then when you double-click the flagged item, macOS will treat it as if it has just been downloaded from the Internet.
I check all my apps using this technique before distribution, to ensure that they pass quarantine checks. It has never yet failed me.
If you then want to remove a quarantine flag altogether, open the item in xattred, select the com.apple.quarantine xattr, and click on Cut. The flag will then be removed from that item. Beware, though: real quarantine flags are also set on all executable code within the app bundle too.
I hope that helps,
Howard.